the philosophers whose work the young Sartre proposed to study if
granted the research fellowship in Berlin for which he was applying.
Let us remember Sartre’s sympathy with value intuitionism when we
encounter his claim in an influential public lecture: “For in effect, there
is not one of our acts that, in creating the man we wish to be, does not at
the same time create animageof man such as we judge heoughtto be.”^50
But at this stage in BN, Sartre insists that value and prereflective
consciousness are correlative, they form a dyad. “Value is not known at
this stage since knowledge posits the object in the face of consciousness.
Value is merely given with the non-thetic translucency of the for-itself,
which makes itself be as the consciousness of being” (BN 94 – 95 ).
The question of the “objective encounter with values in the world”
cannot be addressed until we have discussed the nature of the for-
others, the third mode or aspect of being to be examined. The reference
to “image” of the man that ought to be, reminds us that the pervasive
role of imaging consciousness in Sartre’s thought has been a theme of
our philosophical history.
“The For-Itself and the Being of Possibilities”InThe Imaginary, Sartre describes imaging consciousness as the locus
of negativity, possibility and lack.^51 It is beginning to look as if these
features of imaging consciousness in the earlier work have become
features of consciousness in general. We have just observed how value
is co-present (haunts) prereflective consciousness. This is true of possi-
bility as well. Though Sartre does not agree with Aristotle in ascribing
“potentiality” to the in-itself, neither does he second Heidegger’s assign-
ment of an ontological priority to possibility over actuality. “Just as there
can be lack in the world only if it comes to the world through a being
which is its own lack, so there can be possibility in the world only if it
comes through a being which is for itself in its own possibility” (BN 98 )
The possible, Sartre allows, is a new aspect of the nihilation of the
in-itself in for-itself. Again pointing toward the chapter on temporality,
(^50) EH 291 ;F 25 , emphasis added. See Ge ́rard Wormser, “Ethique et violence dans les ‘Cahiers
51 pour une morale,’”Cite ́no.^22 (^2005 ):^73 –^88.
This a composite of related claims about imaging consciousness made inThe Imaginary(see
above,Chapter 5 ,page 134 ).
192 The war years, 1939–1944